Moonscorn

Chapter Three

     Opening her eyes was harder than she expected. There was a fuzzy feeling in her limbs which only slightly counteracted the throbbing ache in her bones and joints, and the bright white light of the hospital ward threatened to burn away her eyes. After a few moments of realising that despite the discomfort, she wasn't dead, she opened her eyes and took in her surroundings. Hospital bed, beeping monitors nearby, curtains against the outside world. Yup. Back in The Conservatory. She spent so much time here she was surprised they didn't have a bed specifically reserved in her name.

Hysteria sat up in the bed with teeth gritted against stabs of pain breaking through the drug-fuzz. Went to call for someone but all she got was a rasp. She put a hand to her throat and found several layers of bandages. The hell had happened? Something while she was out of it, lupine, that much was for sure. Specifics were blurry, however. Most of the time, she never remembered them, and she had a feeling this instance wasn't going to be much different.

The door to the ward opened and a man in a long white coat straight from the costume shop walked in. He'd even got a clipboard in hand and spectacles balanced on the end of a large nose which reminded her of Concorde. If Hysteria hadn't known him from previous stays in his care, she would have been looking around for the theatre curtains to open and the audience to sit down for the start of the play. "Hysteria Scorn," the man said. "You're lucky The Conservatory pays for all of this, or you'd be selling your kidneys fairly soon."

Hysteria tried to speak again and got a little squeak. Enough to grate out some words. "Wha... happn'd...?

"Well, an untrained eye would look at you, cuts and gashes and bite marks and significant puncture marks in the neck, and say you looked like you'd been attacked by a werewolf."

"To your eye... Dr Kratis?"

"To my trained eye, you look like you've been attacked by a werewolf. Now please try not to talk, unless you want to have Dr Persephone rejoicing that they've finally shut you up for good."

Hysteria's attempt at "she'd like that" came out as a pitiful grunt. Dr Kratis snorted in amusement and prepared a hypodermic filled with a purple liquid Hysteria hoped would knock her into next century.

"This should help you out somewhat. Three full days of rest, which will unfortunately give you back some of your vocal cords. No, there's not much else for it. You've had all the other drugs that work on you. There's no better healer than time, even for a poor Hippocratic devotee like myself."

Hysteria lay back. Thank all the heavens for small medical mercies. Anything to make the painful fuzzing go away.

Dr Kratis tapped the syringe and squirted a little out to eliminate any air bubbles. He took Hysteria exposed arm, found a vein running underneath the bottom jaw of a tattooed laughing skull, and put the needle to it. "By the way, Persephone told me to tell you that you're under house arrest for a month."

Hysteria had time to widen her eyes in horror before Katris emptied the syringe into her system. Her eyes glazed over like cloud covering the moon and she fell into a dreamless abyss before she could give her eloquent, distinctly Hysteria Scorn, reply; Fuck you.

***

Persephone held the bottle of red wine up to a sleepy eye, wondered if she should pretend to have a sense of decorum by getting a glass, then took the cork out and drank from the neck. She hadn't slept yet. Instead, she'd filed off two reports, supervised getting Hysteria back in one piece, and had only just managed to get out of the boardroom by pleading cognitive impairment through lethargy. She should, by rights, be sleeping. Not that she'd be listening to them too intently if she were awake. She was all for paperwork and a proper professional attitude, but those guys weren't out in the field anymore. Hadn't been for a good decade or so. They didn't know.